Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

‘You and a number of others. Ah . . . It is time.’

‘For what?’

All the display screens cleared down. ‘Look out of the windows.’

For some time the ground had been steadily rising, but it was a fractured ground, ash-blanketed, strewn with immense rocks. It was as if, Joshua thought, they were following debris rays towards a great lunar crater.

Quite abruptly the ground fell away, as if they had sailed over a cliff. Joshua looked down to see a landscape like some gloomy artist’s palette: swirls of reddish rock, lava pools that bubbled languidly, sulphur-yellow scum beneath wraiths of steam. His view was obscured by heat shimmer, and he heard switches being thrown in the gondola’s air conditioning unit, as suddenly, after hours of fighting off arctic chill, now it strove to exclude the sudden warmth.

And when he looked ahead, beyond the curdled plain below, he saw a kind of cliff face, very far off, blued by the mist of distance, shimmering in heat haze.

Lobsang said, ‘This is the caldera, Joshua. The crater. So big you can’t really see that it’s circular from here. The ground, below, is half a mile down – we’re above the collapsed magma chamber. And the caldera’s far wall is over forty miles away. We were unlucky actually.’

‘Unlucky?’

‘The supervolcano erupts every half million years or so. Some eruptions are worse than others – in some, more magma is released, more damage is done. This was the worst for two million years. The geologists were able to tell us that much, even though they didn’t see it coming. And the result lies around you.’

Joshua had no words.

‘Impressive, isn’t it? Even to God, it must be quite a sight. Even to me . . .’ His voice wavered oddly.

Joshua felt a flicker of concern. ‘Lobsang? Are you all right?’

Lobsang didn’t answer. But he said, more uncertainly, ‘I don’t ask this of you lightly, Joshua. To travel again, I mean. I have become more aware of the risks I ask you to take when stepping into the Long Earth. Any of us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you considered what would happen were you to die out there? I’m referring to the fate of your immortal soul. Can a discarnate soul cross stepwise between the worlds? If you were alone – in a world in which there were no other humans to host your spirit – you might not be able to reincarnate as a human at all.’

Joshua had come across this kind of idea before, mostly from the sort of earnest swivel-eyed zealot who waited to harangue you at twain terminals. It was mildly shocking to hear Lobsang saying this. For all Lobsang’s claims about his origin, that he was the soul of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated into a gel-substrate supercomputer, they had never delved too deeply into the mystical side of that proposition. But Joshua thought of the small Buddhist shrine tucked into a corner of the airship. Perhaps Lobsang was changing, reaching for his own deeper roots.

‘I take it you’ve been studying this reincarnation business?’

‘Wouldn’t you? And I’ve had a lot of encouragement from Agnes in such matters. Buddhism, you know, is essentially a way of working with the mind. By developing the basic potential of the mind you can achieve inner peace, compassion and wisdom. All of us can do this. But I am nothing but mind, Joshua. How could I fail to be drawn to such ideas, even without my cultural background? As for ideas of reincarnation, I’ve gone into them deeply. I am familiar with over four thousand texts on the subject, besides my own experience.’

‘Oh.’

‘Also I have been counselled by Padmasambhava, an old friend in my previous life, now the abbot of a monastery in Ladakh. Which is in India, just beyond the Tibetan border, and a place where the old wisdom has been preserved despite the Chinese occupation. Although Padmasambhava is himself a shareholder in a Chinese logging consortium . . . I am not losing my mind, you know,’ said Lobsang severely.

‘I didn’t say you were. But it’s odd to hear you express self-doubt, Lobsang—’

‘I think I remember my death.’

That stopped Joshua in his tracks. ‘What death? You mean—’

‘In Lhasa. My last human death. And my reincarnation.’

Joshua thought that over. ‘So was it like when Doctor Who regenerates?’

‘No, Joshua,’ Lobsang said with strained patience. ‘It was not like when Doctor Who regenerates. I remember it, Joshua. I think . The lamentations of the women, in the kitchen, when the chikhai bardo came, the moment of my death. The Tibetans believe that the soul lingers in the dead body. So for forty-nine days the Book of the Dead is read over the corpse, to guide the soul through the bardos, the phases of existence that bridge life and death.

‘I remember the reading by my friend Padmasambhava. Even the Book itself, I looked down on it from outside my body – the sheets printed from hand-carved blocks, held between wooden covers. I was dead, I was told. Everybody who came before me had died. That I had to recognize my own true nature, the radiant, pure light of continuing consciousness inside the heavy physical body; and with that recognition, liberation would be instantaneous.

‘But after twenty-one days of chanting, if liberation hasn’t come, you enter the sidpa bardo, the bardo of rebirth. You become like a body without substance. You can roam the whole world, tirelessly, seeing all, hearing all, knowing no rest. Yet you are haunted by images from your former life.

‘Now think about that, and look at me, Joshua: I am spread across all the worlds of the Long Earth; I see all, I hear all. What does that sound like but the bardo of rebirth? But to pass on you have to abandon all you have known in this life. How can I do that?

‘Sometimes I fear I am trapped in the sidpa bardo, Joshua. That I am trapped between death and rebirth – that I have never, in fact, been reincarnated, reborn, at all.’ He looked at Joshua with eyes that were dark in the light of a volcano sky. ‘Perhaps even you are a mere projection of my own ego.’

‘Knowing your ego, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

‘And it gets worse. What of the future? What if I can’t die? If I have to wait for the sun to fade before I am released, who then will be left to read the Book of the Dead over me?’

‘Look, Lobsang – this doesn’t sound like you. You never did metaphysical doubt. What if this is a false memory? Suppose somebody, some enemy, has uploaded a virus that’s whispering into your gel-based head . . . Maybe it’s just that kid who Agnes hired to test you. Isn’t that more likely?’

But Lobsang wasn’t listening. He seemed unable to listen.

The twain shuddered in the turbulent air, a mote above the lunar immensity of the Yellowstone caldera.

THERE WAS NO GREAT space-programme-type fuss before Sally Linsay’s journey to Mars: no bone-crunching physical training or survival exercises, no hours in simulators, no photographs on the cover of Time magazine. It did take a couple of weeks for Willis, Frank Wood and Sally to get their act together, however. There were briefings, which Sally mostly skipped, almost on principle . . .

And then, at last, astonishingly, Sally found herself in what Raup called a white room: a suiting-up room, for astronauts.

With the assistance of a couple of female attendants in jumpsuits bearing Boeing logos, Sally had to strip off, was given a rub-down with alcohol, and then put on soft white underclothes. Throughout the flight she would have to wear a belt of some kind of medical telemetry equipment around her chest: the corporate rules of GapSpace, Inc. Then came the spacesuit itself, a kind of heavy coverall of some tough orange fabric, with a rubbery, airtight inner layer. You climbed into this backwards through a gap in the stomach, then zipped it all up at the front. Sally groused her way through this, and through a pressure test when she had to screw on her helmet and the suit was pumped so full of air it made her ears pop.